A method and system for acoustic communication of data

ABSTRACT

The present invention relates to a method for receiving data transmitted acoustically. The method includes receiving an acoustically transmitted signal encoding data; processing the received signal to minimise environmental interference within the received signal; and decoding the processed signal to extract the data. The data encoded within the signal using a sequence of tones. A method for encoding data for acoustic transmission is also disclosed. This method includes encoding data into an audio signal using a sequence of tones. The audio signal in this method is configured to minimise environmental interference. A system and software are also disclosed.

FIELD OF INVENTION

The present invention is in the field of data communication. More particularly, but not exclusively, the present invention relates to a method and system for acoustic communication of data.

BACKGROUND

There are a number of solutions to communicating data wirelessly over a short range to and from devices. The most typical of these is WiFi. Other examples include Bluetooth and Zigbee.

An alternative solution for a short range data communication is described in U.S. patent Publication Ser. No. 12/926,470, DATA COMMUNICATION SYSTEM. This system, invented by Patrick Bergel and Anthony Steed, involves the transmission of data using an audio signal transmitted from a speaker and received by a microphone. This system involves the encoding of data, such as shortcode, into a sequence of tones within the audio signal.

This acoustic communication of data provides for novel and interesting applications. However, acoustic communication of data does involve unique problems. Specifically, because the signals are transmitted acoustically, the receiver receives a signal that may include a lot of interference created by the environment in which the signal is transmitted which may, for example, be reverberation (including early/late reflections). At the point of receiving the audio, distortions caused by interference have the effect of reducing reliable data rates due to the decoder's increased uncertainty about a signal's original specification. For example, early reflections which are coherent but delayed versions of the direct signal, usually created from an acoustic reflection from a hard surface, may make it more difficult for a decoder to confidently determine the precise start or end point of a signal feature/note. This decreases overall reliability. It is therefore preferable to reduce these effects at the receiver. Otherwise the data encoded within the signal can be difficult to accurately detect. This can result in non-communication of data in certain environments or under certain conditions within environments.

There is a desire to improve the acoustic communication of data.

It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and system for acoustic communication of data which overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art, or at least provides a useful alternative.

SUMMARY OF INVENTION

According to a first aspect of the invention there is provided a method for receiving data transmitted acoustically, including:

a) receiving an acoustically transmitted signal encoding data; b) processing the received signal to minimise environmental interference within the received signal; and c) decoding the processed signal to extract the data. wherein the data is encoded within the transmitted signal using a sequence of tones.

The signal may be human-audible.

The environmental interference may be caused by/during transmission of the signal.

The environmental interference may be reverberation.

The received signal may be processed frame by frame. Each frame of the received signal may be processed to generate a Fast-Fourier Transform (FFT).

The FFT for at least some of the frames may be processed to modify a magnitude in each bin of the FFT in accordance with a magnitude value of the corresponding bin in a preceding frame.

An impulse response of an acoustic environment may be calculated. The impulse response may be calculated via measurements of the acoustic space.

The impulse response may be processed to generate a transfer function. The received signal may be processed using the transfer function.

The signal may be received via a microphone.

According to a further aspect of the invention there is provided a method for encoding data for acoustic transmission, including

encoding data into an audio signal using a sequence of tones; wherein the audio signal is configured to minimise environmental interference.

Characteristics of at least some of the tones and/or sequence of tones may be modified to minimise the environmental interference. The characteristics may be modified based upon predictions of interference caused to the sequence of tones when received by a receiver. The predictions may relate to interference generated by acoustic transmission of the sequence of tones. The interference generated may be non-direct acoustic energy. The interference may be reverberation.

The audio signal may be configured by configuring the sequence of tones such that at least some of the tone frequencies are arranged from high to low. The at least some of the tone frequencies may correspond to a plurality of tones at the beginning of the signal.

The audio signal may be configured by configuring the sequence of tones to insert space between at least some of the tones within the signal.

The audio signal may be configured by sharpening the amplitude envelope of each tone signal within the audio signal.

The audio signal may be configured by configuring the sequence of tones to avoid repeating same or similar frequency tones one after the other.

The environmental interference may be reverberation.

The method of the above aspect may further include the step of acoustically transmitting the audio signal for receipt by a microphone.

Other aspects of the invention are described within the claims.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

Embodiments of the invention will now be described, by way of example only, with reference to the accompanying drawings in which:

FIG. 1: shows a block diagram illustrating a system in accordance with an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 2: shows a flow diagram illustrating a method in accordance with an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 2a : shows a diagram illustrating reduction of reverberation of tones within a received audio signal in accordance with an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 2b : shows a diagram illustrating reduction of reverberation of tones using a variable alpha value within a received audio signal in accordance with an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 20: shows a diagram illustrating determination of an impulse response for use in a method in accordance with an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 2d : shows a diagram illustrating use of a determined impulse response to deconvolute an input signal in accordance with an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 3: shows a flow diagram illustrating a method in accordance with an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 3a : shows a diagram illustrating configuring an audio signal to reduce reverberation interference by spacing the tones within the sequence of tones in accordance with an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 3b : shows a diagram illustrating configuring an audio signal to reduce interference by prevented repeated tones within the sequence of tones in accordance with an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 3c : shows a diagram illustrating configuring an audio signal to reduce interference by modify tones to include multiple frequencies in accordance with an embodiment of the invention; and

FIG. 4: shows a diagram illustrating an encoding format for an audio signal for use with methods in accordance with embodiments of the invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

The present invention provides a method and system for the acoustic communication of data.

The inventors have discovered that, when the data is encoded in sequence of tones, that the received signal can be processed to minimise environmental interference before decoding, such processing enables more accurate decoding of the signal into the data. Furthermore, the inventors have discovered that the signal can be encoded before acoustic transmission to also minimise environmental interference. Thereby, improving accuracy of data decoding by the recipient.

In FIG. 1, a system 100 in accordance with an embodiment of the invention is shown.

A first device is shown 101. This device 101 may include a processor 101 a and a speaker 102. The processor 101 a may be configured to encode data into a sequence of tones within an audio signal. The signal may be encoded by the processor 101 a to minimise environmental interference. The processor 101 a may be configured to perform the method described in relation to FIG. 3.

The device 101 may be configured to acoustically transmit the signal, for example, via the speaker 102.

The environmental interference may be that which would be generated by acoustic transmission of signal by the speaker 102. The environmental interference may be distortion introduced by the speaker 102 or non-direct acoustic energies caused by this transmission such as reverberation. In this document, the term reverberation should be interpreted to cover first order reflections and echoes as well as true reverberation (e.g. later order reflections). The signal may be encoded by modifying characteristics of the tones and/or sequence of tones based upon, for example, predicting the environmental interference that would be caused to a signal received by a receiver.

The processor 101 a and device 101 may encode and output the audio signal via a standard digital to analogue converter or via pulse-width modulation. Pulse-width modulation may be more efficient on very low power devices.

The audio signal may be encoded dynamically for immediate acoustic transmission or precomputed and stored in memory for later playback.

In embodiments, the processor 101 a and speaker 102 may not be co-located at the same device. For example, the processor 101 a may encode the data into the audio signal and transmit the audio signal to a device for acoustic transmission at the speaker 102. The audio signal may be stored at a memory before acoustic transmission.

A second device 103 is shown. This second device 103 may include or be connected to a microphone 104. The microphone 104 may be configured to receive signals acoustically transmitted, for example, by the first device 101, and to forward those signals to one or more processors 105 within the second device 103. In embodiments, the processor(s) 105 are not located within the second device 103. For example, the processor(s) 105 may be remotely located.

The microphone 104 and the processor(s) 105 may be connected via a communications bus or via a wired or wireless network connection.

The processor(s) 105 may be configured to process the signal to minimise environmental interference and to decode the signal to extract data. The data may have been encoded within the signal as a sequence of tones. The environmental interference may have been generated by acoustic transmission of the signal by speaker (such speaker 102) including, for example, distortion caused by the speaker or playback media (e.g. tape/vinyl/compression codecs) or non-direct acoustic energies such as reverberation.

The processor(s) 105 may be configured to perform the method described in relation to FIG. 2.

In some embodiments, the microphone 104 may be configured with a narrow polar response to further mitigate environmental interference such as reverberation and any other non-direct acoustic energies.

In some embodiments, the second device may include multiple microphones 104 coordinated in a phase-array or beam-forming implementation to further mitigate environmental interference.

It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that the above embodiments of the invention may be deployed on different devices and in differing architectures.

Referring to FIG. 2, a method 200 for receiving acoustically transmitted data in accordance with an embodiment of the invention will be described.

In step 201, an acoustically transmitted signal is received (for example, via microphone 104). The signal encodes data. The data is encoded as a sequence of tones. The encoding format of the signal may include a header, error correction and a payload. An example of an encoding format is shown in FIG. 4. The encoding format may define that all or at least part of each of the header, error correction and payload are encoded as a sequence of tones. Reed-Solomon may be used as error correction. It will be appreciated that other error correction methods may be used such as Hamming or Turbo Codes. At least a part of the encoding of the data and/or encoding format of the signal may be performed as described in U.S. patent Publication Ser. No. 12/926,470.

The signal may be human-audible, either fully or at least in part. For example, data may be encoded within the signal across a frequency spectrum which includes human-audible frequencies.

The inventors note that human-audible frequencies are particularly vulnerable to environmental interference caused by reverberation of the acoustically transmitted signal within the environment due to the sound absorption coefficient of materials being generally proportional to frequency (causing reverberation at human-audible frequencies but little reverberation at higher frequencies).

In step 202, the signal is processed to minimise environmental interference. The environmental interference may be non-direct acoustic energy having originally emanated from the signal transmitting device such as reverberation. The signal may be processed to minimise interference by artificially compounding the decay of non-direct energy.

In one embodiment, the signal may be processed using a fast fourier transform (FFT) to produce bins of magnitudes across the spectrum. The FFT can be calculated on a per-frame basis. With the reverb cancellation values, the value passed to a decoding engine at a given frame t (Z_(t)) is a combination of the current FFT magnitude (X_(t)) and a function of previous output values (Y_(t-1)):

Y _(t)=α_(b) Y _(t-1)+(1−α_(b))X _(t)

Z _(t) =X _(t) −βY _(t-1)

Where the reverb cancellation is characterised by:

-   -   α_(b)∈[0, 1]: reverb rolloff exponent for a given FFT bin b,         which should be selected proportionally to the length of the         reverb tail of the acoustic environment; Typically close to 1.     -   β∈[0, 1]: reverb cancellation magnitude, which determine the         degree to which reverb is subtracted from the magnitude of the         current spectral frame.

FIG. 2a shows an example where reverberation reduction is applied to a sequence of tones (e,g. to convert audio signal 203 to 204 such that the tone 204 a in the signal is more distinguishable by reducing its reverberation 204 b to 204 c). Lower frequencies tend to exhibit longer reverberation times (RT60), so reverb reduction is less effective in these lower bands.

FIG. 2b shows an example where a variable a value across bands compensates for differing RT60 values across the frequency spectrum in converting audio signal 205 to 206.

In embodiments, the value may be passed to one or more of a plurality of decoding engines, or all of a plurality of decoding engines. The decoding engines may be voters as defined in UK Patent Application No. 1617408.8 and a process for decoding the signal may proceed as outlined in that document. For example, each of the voters may be tuned to decode the value in a different way (for example, assuming different acoustic characteristics of the environment) and the decoded value may be decided as that which the most voters agree with.

In one embodiment, as illustrated in FIG. 2c , an impulse response of an acoustic environment may be calculated (in this example, by transmission and capture of a burst of white noise 207 to characterise the frequency response 208 of the space) and the signal may be processed using a transfer function derived from the impulse response. The impulse response may be calculated via measurements of an acoustic space. The input signal prior to performing the FFT is then deconvolved with the impulse response which may remove room artifacts including reverberation, strong reflections, transducer responses and distortions added by the frequency response characteristics of a space. Deconvolution of a reveberant signal with an impulse response reducing the impact of reverberation from an acoustic space is illustrated in FIG. 2d (e.g. the tone is shown at 209 and the reverberation is shown at 210).

In one embodiment, values of α and β can be altered dynamically to increase the system's efficacy during operation or due to changing environmental factors such as different locations or changes to a single space which may affect its reverberation characteristics, such as the materials in it or its layout. Parameters α and β may be changed, for example, by observing the sound energy decay following an encoded tone of known length, or by applying successive values of each and observing and maximising the decoder's tone detection confidence.

Referring to FIG. 3, a method 300 for acoustically transmitting data in accordance with an embodiment of the invention will be described.

In step 301, the data may be encoded into an audio signal using a sequence of tones. The encoding format of the signal may include a header, error correction and a payload. An example of an encoding format is described in relation to FIG. 4. Reed-Solomon may be used as error correction, or other error correction such as Hamming or Turbo Codes. At least one stage of the encoding of the data and/or encoding format of the audio signal may be performed as described in U.S. patent Publication Ser. No. 12/926,470. The audio signal may be human-audible, either fully or at least in part.

The audio signal may be configured to minimise environmental interference. The environmental interference may be that which would be generated by acoustic transmission of signal by the speaker (e.g. 102). The environmental interference may be non-direct acoustic energies caused by this transmission such as reverberation.

The signal may be configured to minimise environmental interference by modifying characteristics of the tones and/or sequence of tones based upon, for example, predicting the environmental interference that would be caused to the audio signal when acoustically received by a receiver (e.g. at a microphone 104). Characteristics of the tones that may be modified may include tone length, tone waveform (e.g. sharp edges to the waveform envelope), tone frequencies (e.g. avoiding resonant frequencies for the environment) or multi-frequency tones. Characteristics of the sequence that may be modified may include tone order (e.g. ordering a high frequency tone before a low frequency tone, and preventing proximity of the same or similar tones in the sequence) and gaps between tones in the sequence.

In embodiments, at least a portion of the audio signal is configured to sequence adjacent tones from high to low to reduce frequency tails from a preceding tone from overlapping with a subsequent tone in a reverberant space. In one example, the initial portion of the audio signal is configured in this way. This initial portion may comprise the header or a portion of the header. This portion may be identical for every signal and constitute the “front-door” sound for the protocol.

In embodiments as shown in FIG. 3a , at least a portion of the audio signal is configured to insert gaps or time intervals between tones within the sequence of tones to reduce, for example, overlapping frequencies in a reverberant space. This reduces cross-talk between tones.

In embodiments, at least a portion of the audio signal is configured to sharpen the amplitude envelopes of the tone signals within the portion. This may be done by altering the amplitude envelope of each note within the signal, typically by using very short duration attack and decay phases such that the note's total acoustic energy is maximised. Typically also a note will have a short amplitude decay such that the end of the note is clearly defined to have occurred at a specific time.

In embodiments, several steps at the encoding side of the transmission may be made to make the transmission more resilient to reverberation, by altering the signal to avoid temporal effects (acoustic energy remaining after an encoded tone) and spectral effects (specific frequencies being prone to resonance, for example at room modes).

-   1. The ‘front door tones’—those tones responsible for announcing the     commencement of the encoded data are lengthened (providing more     energy here for the decoder) and their notes separated by small     intervals of silence (allowing reverberant energy to subside in     between notes). -   2. Reverb is frequency dependent and in most common room acoustics     reverberation decay rates are higher (more damped) at higher     frequencies. The front-door tones may be thus designed to go     high-low such that the first tone is less likely to mask the second     when compared to the other way around. -   3. Spaces between notes ensure that the acoustic energy in a room is     dissipated to a degree between notes—decreasing the likelihood that     energy from the previous note(s) will remain at a level at which it     could interfere with the peak detection of the current note. -   4. The encoder can encode the data in such a way that repeated notes     are avoided as shown in FIG. 3b , and subsequent notes are spaced     maximally apart with respect to frequency. This again ensures that     the energies from neighbouring notes do not interfere with peak     detection. -   5. Encoding frequencies may be chosen so as to avoid being near     resonant frequencies present in the transmission space which may be     caused by room modes (resonant frequencies of a room—typically those     frequencies with wavelengths at integer multiples of the distance(s)     between walls, floor and ceiling). This decreases the likelihood of     errors due the effect of longer reverberation energies at particular     frequencies. -   6. Encoding tone length may be chosen proportional to the     reverberation time of the room. This again ensures that the energies     from neighbouring notes do not interfere with peak detection. -   7. Encoding tones may contain several frequencies as illustrated in     FIG. 3c . This again ensures that the energies from neighbouring     notes do not interfere with peak detection, and reduces the     likelihood that strong resonances or reverberation at lower     frequencies affects detection. The frequencies may be independent,     similar to having 2 separate channels, or represent in combination a     single symbol, similar to the DTMF encoding standard using Dual (or     ‘n’) Tone Multiple Frequency Shift keying which is well known by     experts in the field.

Referring to FIG. 3b , Avoiding note repetition is beneficial because the decoder can be configured to avoid classifying the same note twice in sequence, mitigating the effects of reverb. One approach is to replace repeats with an out-of-band “repeat” symbol, indicating that the previous symbol has occurred again. For longer sequences, this can be extended to an arbitrary number of out-of-band repeat symbols.

Referring to FIG. 4, an encoding format will be described. This encoding format comprises a header 400 which includes “front door” start tones. These tones may be the same across all audio signals encoding data within the system and can assist a receiver to determine when an audio signal which encodes data. The encoding format further comprises a payload 401 and forward error correction 402. It can be seen that this encoding format defines the header 400, payload 401 and forward error correction 402 as comprising a sequence of tones across a frequency spectrum. Preferably this frequency spectrum includes or comprises the human-audible frequency spectrum. The tones may be monophonic or polyphonic.

Potential advantages of some embodiments of the present invention include:

-   -   Improved reliability in environments which create interference         in the received signal such as reverberant rooms by making the         signal passed to the decoder more closely resemble the output of         the encoder;     -   The processing of the signal is both performant and efficient         (both in memory and time) and requires no prior training or         knowledge of the expected signal; and     -   No direct measurement of the acoustic space either before         transmission or during is necessary, though the option to do so         is still available in order to further minimise environmental         interference.

While the present invention has been illustrated by the description of the embodiments thereof, and while the embodiments have been described in considerable detail, it is not the intention of the applicant to restrict or in any way limit the scope of the appended claims to such detail. Additional advantages and modifications will readily appear to those skilled in the art. Therefore, the invention in its broader aspects is not limited to the specific details, representative apparatus and method, and illustrative examples shown and described. Accordingly, departures may be made from such details without departure from the spirit or scope of applicant's general inventive concept. 

1. A method for receiving data transmitted acoustically, including: a) receiving an acoustically transmitted signal encoding data; b) processing the received signal to minimise environmental interference within the received signal; and c) decoding the processed signal to extract the data; wherein the data is encoded within the transmitted signal using a sequence of tones.
 2. A method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the signal is human-audible.
 3. A method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the environmental interference is caused by/during transmission of the signal.
 4. A method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the environmental interference is reverberation.
 5. A method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the received signal is processed frame by frame.
 6. A method as claimed in claim 5, wherein each frame of the received signal is processed to generate a Fast-Fourier Transform (FFT).
 7. A method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the FFT for at least some of the frames is processed to modify a magnitude in each bin of the FFT in accordance with a magnitude value of the corresponding bin in a preceding frame.
 8. A method as claimed in claim 1, wherein an impulse response of an acoustic environment is calculated.
 9. A method as claimed in claim 8, wherein the impulse response is calculated via measurements of the acoustic space.
 10. A method as claimed in claim 8, wherein the impulse response is processed to generate a transfer function.
 11. A method as claimed in claim 8, wherein the received signal is processed using the transfer function.
 12. A method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the signal is received via a microphone.
 13. A method for encoding data for acoustic transmission, including encoding data into an audio signal using a sequence of tones; wherein the audio signal is configured to minimise environmental interference.
 14. A method as claimed in claim 13, wherein characteristics of at least some of the tones and/or sequence of tones are modified to minimise the environmental interference.
 15. A method as claimed in claim 14, wherein the characteristics are modified based upon predictions of interference caused to the sequence of tones when received by a receiver.
 16. A method as claimed in claim 15, wherein the predictions relate to interference generated by acoustic transmission of the sequence of tones.
 17. A method as claimed in claim 13, wherein the interference generated is non-direct acoustic energy.
 18. A method as claimed in claim 17, wherein the interference is reverberation.
 19. A method as claimed in claim 13, wherein the audio signal is configured by configuring the sequence of tones such that at least some of the tone frequencies are arranged from high to low.
 20. A method as claimed in claim 19, wherein the at least some of the tone frequencies correspond to a plurality of tones at the beginning of the signal.
 21. A method as claimed in claim 13, wherein the audio signal is configured by configuring the sequence of tones to insert space between at least some of the tones within the signal.
 22. A method as claimed in claim 13, wherein the audio signal is configured by sharpening the amplitude envelope of each tone signal within the audio signal.
 23. A method as claimed in claim 13, wherein the audio signal is configured by configuring the sequence of tones to avoid repeating same or similar frequency tones one after the other.
 24. A method as claimed in claim 13, wherein the environmental interference is reverberation.
 25. A method as claimed in claim 13, further including the step of acoustically transmitting the audio signal for receipt by a microphone.
 26. An apparatus for receiving data transmitted acoustically, the apparatus comprising one or more processors configured to perform the method of claim
 1. 27. A system for receiving data transmitted acoustically, including: a first device comprising a speaker for acoustically transmitting the signal and one or more processors configured for performing the method of claim 13; and a second device comprising a microphone for acoustically receiving the signal and one or more processors.
 28. (canceled)
 29. A computer readable medium configured for storing configured for performing the method of claim 1 when executed on one or more processors.
 30. An apparatus for receiving data transmitted acoustically, the apparatus comprising one or more processors configured to perform the method of claim
 13. 31. A computer readable medium configured for storing configured for performing the method of claim 13 when executed on one or more processors. 